Colombian Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is suffering
from dementia and has been forced to stop writing, his family have said.

The brother of the 1982 Nobel literature laureate said he has tried to keep news about Marquez's health a secret, not because there is anything people should not know "but because it's his life and he's always tried to protect it."

"The fact is there are lots of comments. Some are true but they're always filled with morbid (details). Sometimes you get the sense they'd rather he were dead, as if his death were some great news," Jaime Garcia Marquez said.

He told students at a lecture in the city of Cartagena that his brother, who is 84, phones him frequently to ask basic questions.

"He has problems with his memory. Sometimes I cry because I feel like I'm losing him," he said, adding that he had now stopped writing altogether.

Jaime Garcia Marquez, his younger brother, is the first family member to speak publicly about it.

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Invited to talk about his relationship with Gabo, as the writer is affectionately known in Colombia, Jaime said he could not hold back from talking about his illness anymore.

"He is doing well physically, but he has been suffering from dementia for a long time," he said. "From a physical standpoint he's doing well, although he now has some memory lapses" aggravated by his long recovery from lymphatic cancer, first diagnosed in 1999.

"Dementia runs in our family and he's now suffering the ravages prematurely due to the cancer that put him almost on the verge of death," he said.

"Chemotherapy saved his life, but it also destroyed many neurons, many defences and cells and accelerated the process.

"But he still has the humour, joy and enthusiasm that he has always had."

Best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has sold more than 30 million copies, Marquez now lives in Mexico and has not written anything since the publication five years ago of his last novel, Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores, which received mixed reviews.

A pioneer of the literary school of magical realism, his novels include Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and the The General in His Labyrinth.

Jaime Garcia Marquez, who heads the Ibero-American New Journalism Foundation, founded by Gabo in 1994 in Cartagena, said it is regrettable that his brother is not in condition to write the second part of his autobiography, Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale), nor any other work.

"Unfortunately, I don't think that'll be possible, but I hope I'm wrong," he said.